


Five Gifts Gendry Gives Arya, and One Gift She Gives Him

by jeeno2



Series: Five Things [3]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Future, Canon Compliant, F/M, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-22
Updated: 2014-01-22
Packaged: 2018-01-09 14:25:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1147047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeeno2/pseuds/jeeno2
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some of which are unexpected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Gifts Gendry Gives Arya, and One Gift She Gives Him

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Day Three of the Game of Ships' Ice and Fire Challenge on tumblr. The prompt was "Gift-Giving."

**One**

When Gendry Waters looks up from his anvil and sees Lord Stark, the new King’s Hand, entering the smithy, he immediately stops his work and bends the knee.  Just as he’s been taught to do whenever a highborn lord or lady comes calling ever since he was old enough to hold a hammer.

Gendry’s heard rumors round Flea Bottom that there’s something queer about Lord Stark.  That he’s stranger, even, than the _last_ Hand, who’d been the dourest person Gendry ever had the misfortune of waiting on.  

Lord Stark never smiles, they say.  Even though he lives in the Tower of the Hand with his two pretty daughters and has more gold in his pocket than Gendry will ever see in his lifetime. And Lord Stark apparently complains endlessly about how hot King’s Landing is, even though no one here can remember a colder summer.

As if to confirm these odd rumors Lord Stark pulls Gendry up by the armpits less than a half-second after he bends the knee and stands him up at his full height. Which is a shockingly strange thing for him to do.

Gendry’s very tall for a boy who’s only had fourteen name days.  People always tell him that, but they don’t need to because he isn’t _stupid._  He stands a full half-head taller than Lord Stark, standing upright like this.  It makes him feel strange, this difference in their heights.  He tries to turn his head and avert his eyes out of respect.

But Lord Stark doesn’t let him.  He grabs Gendry by the chin.  Not roughly; but deliberately.  Gendry knows without a doubt that he’s being commanded to look directly into the older man’s eyes.

And so he does.

Whatever Lord Stark sees in Gendry’s startles him so much that his mouth falls open and he drops his hand as though touching Gendry had burned him.

“Milord?” Gendry asks, uncertain, and not a little unsettled, over what just happened.

But Lord Stark recovers his composure quickly.  He shakes his head a few times, as if to clear it, and coughs quietly into his hand.

“I’ve come to talk to you and your master about a pair of bracelets for my daughters,” Lord Stark says, his voice shaky and hoarse.  He says nothing about what just transpired between them.  Gendry follows his lead and stays quiet. “My daughters both miss Winterfell terribly.  I thought a gift for each them – made right here, in King’s Landing – might help them warm up to their new home.”

Lord Stark begins describing what he has in mind, and Gendry rushes to get a quill and a bit of parchment so he won’t miss any details.  He wants Gendry to etch the profile of a direwolf onto the face of each bracelet, and to fashion the bracelets from both ivory and steel – “To remind my girls of where they’re from and of who they are, and to remind them they are both beautiful and strong –“ Lord Stark explains.  He also wants him to add a few embellishments to each band that Gendry recognizes immediately as designs popular among southron ladies.

“Is that all, milord?” Gendry asks politely, quill still in hand.  These bracelets won’t take but a few hours apiece but he and his master have swords and armor to make for the King’s armies.  They cannot spare much time on trinkets like these, no matter who they’re for.  Best he get started on them right away.

Lord Stark pauses a long moment, as though giving Gendry’s question serious thought.

“No,” he says at length, his voice tinged with sadness and something else Gendry cannot identify.  “That’s nowhere near all.”  He closes his eyes.  “But I’m afraid it’s all we can accomplish today.”

* * *

 

**Two**

Gendry is hot, and tired, and hungry. 

He guesses they all are.  Yorik – the old crow marching them north to the Wall – doesn’t seem to like to break for food or rest.

Gendry does not know why he’s here.  Three nights ago he went to bed as the favored apprentice of Tobho Mott, King’s Landing’s master blacksmith.  And two mornings ago that all came to an abrupt end when Mott dumped a pail of water on Gendry’s head to wake him.

“You’ve got an hour to clear out your things, boy” Mott told him gruffly as Gendry spluttered, unable to believe what he was hearing.  Gendry noted, even through his shock, that Mott couldn’t look him in the eye as he spoke.  “You’re off to the Wall now.”

That was all Gendry got by way of explanation from his former master.  Two hours later he was marching out of Kings Landing, the only home he’d ever known, with some of the vilest criminals and greenest boys he’d ever met.

He’s spent most of the past two days wondering what it was he did to displease his former master.  But they’re miles from Kings Landing now, and he knows he’ll never see Mott again to ask him why. 

Gendry is interrupted from his musings when he catches sight of one of the youngest boys in their party – he can’t be much older than nine or ten, from the looks of him – being pushed and shoved around by a group of bigger boys.

The bullies are bigger than the little one, anyway.  Not bigger than Gendry.

Gendry pushes his way through the line separating him from the fight, clenching his fists.  If there’s one thing he cannot stand it’s people using their size and strength against those who can’t defend themselves.  He’s seen more than enough of that kind of thing in his fourteen years to last a lifetime.

When Gendry arrives at the scene he gives the boy doing most of the shoving – a surly, pudgy boy the others call Hot Pie – a hard kick to the groin.

“ _Fuck_!” the fat boy shouts, grabbing his balls and stumbling drunkenly.  “What you do that for?”

The other boys disperse quickly after that.

“You all right?” Gendry asks the little one after the others have moved off.  Arry, he thinks he’s called.  He looks the boy over for signs of injury.  Gendry’s struck, immediately, by how pale and fine-boned he is for someone from Flea Bottom.

“I’m fine,” Arry says, sticking out his bottom lip stubbornly.  But there’s a bruise already blooming on his right cheek, and the lip he’s sticking out is split from contact with somebody’s fist.  And it’s beginning to swell.  “You didn’t need to do that.  I was handling things fine on my own.”

Gendry snorts.  He jerks his thumb towards the direction he came from. “From back there it didn’t look like you were ‘handling things fine.’”

Arry doesn’t respond.  He turns his back on Gendry and stands up as straight and tall and proud as he can.  The boy is at least a foot shorter than Gendry, and he can’t help but laugh at his stupid bravado as he limps off to join Yorik and the others.

* * *

 

**Three**

But Arry is actually a girl. 

She’s Arya Stark, in fact.

Gendry realizes he should have known she was a girl from the beginning.  The way she’d never piss with any of the rest of them, or take a bath even when it had been days, set her apart from the rest of them right from the start.

Not to mention that the shape of her lips and the gentle curve of her chin made her features far prettier than any he’d ever seen on a _real_ boy before.

“I knew all along,” Gendry tells her smugly.  But that’s a lie.  He’s had his suspicions for a while, but wasn’t completely _sure_ until he went and accused her… and she actually admitted it, furious with him for guessing correctly.

It was all very funny if you thought about it, Gendry decided.  A highborn lady thinking she could convince everyone she was a boy from Flea Bottom.  Gendry’s smarter than most of the rest of this lot but it won’t take the others long to realize what and who she is.

That thought gives him pause.  Most of their traveling companions are rapists and thieves.  Or worse.  There’s no telling what they might do to her when they discover she’s a girl. 

Or who they might sell her to when they realize _which_ girl.

“Let me know when you’re off to take a piss,” Gendry blurts out.  He needs to help protect her secret.  If anyone else finds out…

“What?” Arya asks, taken aback.

Gendry clears his throat and feels his face turn red.  “I mean… I won’t tell anyone. And I’ll watch your back for you whenever you’re… making water or… bathing or…  I mean, I won’t _watch_ your back.  I’d never… not _ever_ watch, but…”

He’s babbling now, and probably sounding like an idiot.  But he can’t seem to shut up.

Arya stares at him as he rambles, one corner of her mouth quirked up in something that looks a little like a half smile.

“Thanks,” she says eventually, abruptly cutting him off.  “But I’m fine.  Yorik will take care of me, and I have Needle besides.”

 _You have me too_ , Gendry vows silently, as Lady Arya Stark stalks off to continue her search for firewood. 

* * *

 

**Four**

By the gods, Arya Stark is a beautiful young woman.

Gendry watches her as she shivers in her sleep on the floor of Harrenhal’s once-great kitchen.  Despite the fact that winter is nearly upon them, the guards here deny them anything but the thinnest sheets for sleeping.  They might as well give them nothing at all for how useless they are for keeping warm. 

The hour is very late, and Gendry should have gone to sleep himself ages ago.   But he came here for a specific purpose and won’t leave her side until he’s carried it out.

He tucks the thick blanket he stole from the castle around Arya’s sleeping form, careful not to wake her or to touch any part of her that she wouldn’t want him to.  Still sleeping, she burrows down into the blanket’s warmth and lets out a sleepy, contented sigh.

The quiet noise goes straight to Gendry’s groin and turns the blood in his veins to fire.  He squeezes his eyes shut tight and tries to fight off the hot spike of desire for this girl that’s become a near daily occurrence for him.

Even though Gendry can never have her – it’s unthinkable, the idea of a lowborn bastard like him having a lady like her – knowing that Arya Stark is warm and comfortable for the first time since they were brought to this horrific place makes the five lashes he earned when he stole this blanket entirely worth it.

At length he opens his eyes, and at the sight of her, lying there, his body screams at him to join under the blanket and pull her close.  His cock – which is permanently half-hard, now, no matter how hard he tries to prevent it, whenever she’s near him – twitches hard against the confines of his breeches at the thought of curling around her small body like a protective spoon.

But Gendry would never dare do such a thing.  And not only because they’re in Harrenhal.

Very gently, so as not to disturb her sleep, he brushes back the front fringe of Arya’s hair and presses a gentle kiss to her forehead.  As much contact with her as he dares, here or anywhere else.

Her skin is very cold to the touch.  But his lips tingle and burn for hours afterwards.

* * *

 

**Five**

Gendry had planned to give Arya her wedding gift as soon as they were rid of their guests and alone together in their bedchamber.

But the moment the heavy door closes behind him her hands are already fumbling at the ties to his breeches.  And he realizes she has other ideas.

“Arya, I –“ Gendry begins.  She doesn’t let him finish, standing on her toes and swallowing the rest of his words with her kiss.  She throws her arms around his neck and lifts herself up, wrapping her strong legs around his waist.  He can feel every bit of her pressed up against every part of him that matters, and when she begins to rock rhythmically against him he decides the gift can wait.

He isn’t certain how such a tiny person can bend him to her will in the bedroom so easily.  But she manages it, somehow, every single time.  He wouldn’t have it any other way.  It’s only a few moments longer before they’re both naked and she’s astride him, his length completely sheathed inside her small, glorious body, her sex clenching and unclenching around him, driving all conscious thought from his head until there is nothing, nothing but this.

Arya doesn’t give him a chance that night to fetch the box under the bed that hides the new sword he’s made her.  In making it he’d wanted to show her that even though she’s agreed to become his wife he will never force her submit to him, or ask her to put down her steel, or to be anything other than who and what she’s always been:  Arya Stark of Winterfell, a she-wolf, _his_ she-wolf.

He’d even planned out how he was going to present it to her.  He’d imagined how her eyes would light up when she saw it for the first time.

But with a final press of her hips and a fierce look in her eyes she unravels him, and he falls, helplessly, into an abyss where there is nothing but her.

* * *

 

Arya finds the sword on her own. 

Gendry wakes in the middle of the night amidst a tangle of rumpled bedsheets to see her sitting upright in bed. The moonlight streaming in from their opened window glints off the blade lying across her bare lap.

Arya must sense he’s awake now because she turns to look at him.  She has an unspoken question for him in her fathomless gray eyes.

“Because I love you, Arya Stark,” he murmurs, his voice thick with sleep and hoarse from their earlier nocturnal activities.  “More than anything.  And I thought this would be a better way to show you that than all those pretty words we said to each other yesterday.”

She smiles at him, and then holds the blade up in front of her face, testing its weight and its heft.  She holds it first in her right hand, and then tosses it to her left. 

She sets it on their nightstand and lies back down next to him, resting her head on his broad, bare chest.

“It’s perfect,” she tells him earnestly.  She kisses his cheek – chastely, this time; with none of the heat of their kisses from earlier this evening.

Gendry wraps his arms around his wife and grins so broadly it feels like his face might split in two.

* * *

 

**One**

When Arya begins to scream like a wild, terrified animal from the other side of the thick wooden door, it takes all of Winterfell’s serving girls – and even a few of its men – to keep Gendry from breaking down the door with his bare hands and rushing to her side.

“It’s no place for men in there, milord,” one of the mousier serving girls tells Gendry, trying to placate him as he struggles in their arms. “The maester says –“

“The _maester_ can go straight to the Seven Hells for all I care!” Gendry growls.  The girl jumps back as though Gendry’s words were a physical blow.

“Gendry.”

Gendry whips his head around at the unexpected sound of Sansa Stark’s voice coming from down the hallway.

“My sister will be fine,” she tells him simply.  Her voice is very calm, which infuriates him.

“You don’t know that!” Gendry shouts at her, thinking of the mother he never knew.  And thinking of Arya, suffering in that horrible room with only an ancient maester and a young midwife to attend to her, all because of him. 

And he lunges forward again with a shout in another futile attempt to _get into that room._

* * *

 

Arya had never seriously considered having children, before.  She never told him as much; but she didn’t have to.  After all, she made no secret of her regular trips to the apothecary for the tea that brought on her monthly blood and prevented a baby from taking root despite the frequency of their couplings. 

And until Jon Snow – or Lord Stark, as he is now known in the North – legitimized him and renamed him Gendry Baratheon, Gendry hadn’t given much thought to having children, either.

But something irrevocably changed in him the day he held that official parchment in his hands.  Once he had a name to pass on – a _real_ name; not just Waters, the mark of a bastard and no real name at all – the idea of having a son to whom he could actually give a real name became irresistible to him. 

It took him months to finally work up the courage to ask Arya if she might be willing.

She never gave him an official reply.  But given everything that’s happened in the year since that conversation occurred, Gendry assumes – correctly, he’s quite certain – that at some point she stopped taking her tea.

Arya never told him this was something she was doing just for him.  But his wild, independent, free-spirited wife didn’t have to tell him that, either.

* * *

 

By the time the babe is born and Gendry is finally allowed inside the room, Arya is sleeping.

The fire is blazing in the hearth.  It looks very freshly stoked to Gendry.  The maester and Arya’s midwife felt strongly that a laboring woman and her babe needed nothing so much as blazing heat when these events occurred in the middle of a harsh winter.  Because of this the room is stifling, despite the temperatures outside that would freeze a man’s flesh right off his bones in under an hour.

Gendry looks to the center of the room and sees his beautiful wife, cradling the child – his child; _their_ child – to her chest.  As she sleeps the babe suckles noisily at her bared breast.

The image of mother and child before him is so beautiful, and so powerfully intimate, that his knees nearly buckle under him.

He walks slowly towards the bed and looks down at the two of them.  His family.

At his approach, Arya stirs a little and opens her eyes.

“I want to call him Eddard,” she says at once.  Her voice sounds raw, but very alert, and relief floods Gendry.  He hasn’t lost her in the process of gaining a son.  “I cannot imagine calling him anything else.”

“Neither can I,” Gendry assures her.  Although in truth, aside from the surname _Baratheon_ , Gendry had given very little though to what they might name their child.

Arya looks up at him with bright eyes and smiles, looking as exhausted as she must feel.  She holds baby Eddard closer to her chest and closes her eyes again.

“You will be the most loved, cherished babe in all of the Seven Kingdoms,” she says fiercely, her voice wavering with emotion.  “Our Eddard Baratheon.”

Gendry sinks to his knees next to Arya at the side of the bed.  For reasons he cannot fully understand, his eyes fill with tears.

“He will be,” he agrees fervently, clutching her hand. 

                                                                                              


End file.
